Exclusive: See Comme des Garçons’ New Air Jordan 11

Comme des Garçons Homme Plus reworks the Air Jordan 11 in black and white, unveiled in a new Tokyo-shot campaign that pairs the cult sneaker with Rei Kawakubo’s architectural tailoring

Designed by Tinker Hatfield and introduced in 1995, the Air Jordan 11, with its flash of patent leather, gave basketball footwear an almost  eveningwear polish. Three decades on, Comme des Garçons Homme Plus has taken that contradiction and given it centre stage.

Contradictions are familiar territory for Comme des Garçons. Rei Kawakubo founded the label in Tokyo in 1969, before bringing her collections to Paris in the early 1980s, where black, asymmetry, oversized proportions and clothes that actively resisted conventional ideas of beauty announced an entirely different way of thinking about fashion. Kawakubo has spent the decades since pulling at and picking apart its most basic assumptions: beautiful and ugly, finished and unfinished, body and garment, fashion and anti-fashion. Homme Plus, launched in 1984, applies that same intelligence to menswear, and the suit has proved particularly fertile material: jackets are stretched, sliced apart, bulked out, collapsed and reconstructed. Putting an Air Jordan beneath all that isn’t quite the culture clash it might initially appear.

For Autumn/Winter 2026, the label revisits the AJ11 in black and white, stripping the shoe back while preserving its glossiness. Patent leather is joined by a gloss-finished midsole, extending the shine from upper to sole. Full-grain and patent leather cover the upper and lining, while branding is debossed. The tongue carries “Homme Plus” in the original Air Jordan 11 typeface.

It belongs neatly within Kawakubo’s Autumn/Winter 2026 collection. Accompanied by the refrain of Michel Polnareff’s Love Me, Please Love Me, the show was conceived around the statement, “Let’s get out of the black hole.” Kawakubo reinforced her men accordingly. Tailoring coiled around the body, sometimes double-layered, bubbling and ruched into masses of fabric that resembled protective carapaces. A trench became an impenetrable dress, its buttoned panels crossing the chest, while elsewhere sections were cut away to expose lace, flesh and hipbones.

In the campaign, photographed by Goldie Williams Vericain outside Comme des Garçons’ Aoyama flagship in Tokyo, the shoes are worn with that same tailoring. The black-and-white photographs make much of contrasts. Elongated black jackets and cavernous trousers against the hard geometry of stone and glass; a sober grey checked double-breasted suit broken by a long white shirttail and a pair of brilliantly white Jordans. Elsewhere, black patent leather catches the light like wet lacquer beneath cropped shorts or pools of dark fabric. The store, which originally opened in 1980, was reworked in 1999 through a collaboration between Kawakubo and architect Takao Kawasaki. Its slanted panes and severe surfaces provide a stark architectural frame. Amid the store’s restraint, the Jordan gleams.